“When the Christians were exhausted from war,” one friar wrote, “God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox.” In sixty days, smallpox carried off at least half of the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan, which had a precontact population of 300,000 or more. Smallpox also killed the very capable successor to Moctezuma, the emperor Cuitláhuac, who in his brief, forty-day rule had swiftly been building military alliances that, had he survived, would very likely have repelled Cortés.
